Sears: In late 2003, I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor to discuss the ACLU's relentless legal attacks on the public celebration of Christmas and how the Alliance Defense Fund was responding to them, including our campaign to educate and equip public officials to stand up the ACLU's multiple year campaign of "fear, intimidation, and disinformation."

At the outset of the interview, Bill O'Reilly asked me: "Mr. Sears, isn't the ACLU an organization that had noble beginnings, but just went off track over the past ten years or so?" Of course, there was not enough time to answer that question in a "sound bite", so I decided right then and there that we would have to write a book to provide an adequate response -- that the ACLU had a VERY different vision right from the start for America than our nation's founders. Craig Osten and I saw how the organization looked "one way from a distance but yet another way up close" so we decided to tell the real story about the ACLU, its founder Roger Baldwin, its ultra-radical roots, its promotion of socialism, and its extreme positions that few Americans know about.

FP: Tell us about some of the extreme positions of the ACLU that many Americans probably do not know about.

Sears: There are so many, but let's start with the issue of marriage. The ACLU's policy guide states that all civil and criminal laws prohibiting polygamy should be done away with. Earlier this year, during a speech at Yale Law School, ACLU President Nadine Strossen said: "We have defended the right for individuals to engage in polygamy. We defend the freedom of choice for mature, consenting individuals."

This is not a new position for the ACLU. Read the wedding "vows" of ACLU founder Roger Baldwin in 1919:

"To us who passionately cherish the vision of a free human society, the present institution of marriage among us is a grim mockery of essential freedom...We deny without reservation the moral right of state or church to bind by force of law a relationship that cannot be maintained by the power of love alone...The highest relationship between a man and a woman is that which welcomes and understands each other's loves....The creative life demands many friendships, many loves shared together openly, honestly, and joyously..." (See pages 12-13 of our book.)

To show how extreme this is, of 92% Americans oppose such practices today as they have for nearly 150 years. Opposition to polygamy was in the first platform adopted by the new Republican Party in 1856 and several western states, including Arizona, where I live today, were required by Congress to outlaw the practice in their state constitutions as a precedent of being admitted to the union and even to bar the future reconsideration of the issue.

The ACLU also asserts that the First Amendment, which was NEVER meant by its authors to do so, "protects" child pornography. This is material so foul, that after my years as a federal prosecutor and Director of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, I call it "crime scene photography" because of the actual abuse required for its production. The ACLU asserts there should be no federal or state governmental restriction on its distribution, reproduction, sale, and use by pedophiles and others. A very small minority of the American public shares this view.

These are just two of the many extreme positions that the ACLU holds that we discuss in the book.

FP: The ACLU is for polygamy and child pornography? This is truly incredible -- and shameful. Why do you think so few people know about this? How come the media isn't all over this outrage?

Sears: The ACLU has made no secret of their incredible "First Amendment" defense of the distribution of even the roughest child pornography for those who know where to look for it. Their former national counsel's testimony supporting this "right" in Washington D.C. before the Pornography Commission was delivered after a slide show of such photos depicting in frightening detail the sexual abuse and then murder of a small boy. The ACLU actually filed a brief before the United States Supreme Court defending the "rights" of child pornographers in the New York v. Ferber case. But they are clever enough that you do not see the ACLU creating television or print ads to proclaim their support for these positions.

And of course no matter how much one is offended by this and other forms of the vilest pornography imaginable, the ACLU say the government cannot take any action that could protect any citizen from unwanted exposure. Ironically, this is the same ACLU which claims that offended persons must be forcefully protected by them in court from the dreaded public display of the Ten Commandments or Christmas.

Similarly, from their founder's earliest sentiments, to their policy guide and board statements, to President Strossen's comments at Yale in 2005 the ACLU record of support for polygamy and much more than that to redefine "marriage" is clear but generally unknown.

The major media has generally given them a free pass on all of this, and why the media choose to ignore these facts and give the ACLU a "free pass" is beyond us.

FP: So what do you think is the ACLU's true agenda?

Sears: To get the answer to this question, let's look at a little history. Today the highest award the ACLU bestows annually is its Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty named for their founder who they still hold in highest regard. Though Baldwin said he was not a communist, he visited the Soviet Union in 1924 and wrote glowingly about Stalin's government and the great social experiment then being undertaken in that country (see page 15 of our book). Then let's look at the words of Roger Baldwin back in 1935 when he wrote the following in his thirtieth anniversary Harvard University classbook:

"I am for Socialism, disarmament, and ultimately the abolishing of the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."

Ask today's ACLU president Nadine Strossen what these words mean to her and today's leadership.

The ACLU's agenda from its beginning has been to radically reshape America into a nation vastly different from that desired by most Americans and that of our Founding Fathers. They got away with nearly two generations of legal battles without really serious or highly organized opposition.

But the good news is that they are not doing so well on a lot of fronts today. Consider the fact that despite the ACLU's eight-decade long campaign against the public display of the Ten Commandments, seventy-five percent of Americans feel that they should be allowed to remain. Despite the ACLU's war on the public celebration of Christmas, ninety-six percent of Americans of all faiths celebrate Christmas and eighty-seven percent believe Christmas displays should be allowed on public property. Despite the ACLU's years of effort to promote unlimited abortion -- and protect even "partial-birth" abortion -- seventy-five percent of Americans now believe that there should be at least some governmental restriction on its practice. Finally, despite their attempts to keep Americans from voting on same-sex "marriage", voters of 18 states have OVERWHELMINGLY affirmed marriage as between one man and one woman by enacting state constitutional amendments to hold the line on activist state judges.

The ACLU desires a secular, faithless America where all memory of faith traditions and religion are absent from the public square, morals are relative, and where parental rights, religious freedom, and the sanctity of human life -- except as defined to be precious to their agenda -- are nearly non-existent. This is the America we will get unless we stand up to the ACLU.

FP: So Roger Baldwin was a Stalinist. The ACLU is founded by a Stalinist and supports polygamy and child pornography and it is considered to be an organization that somehow promotes American values. Unbelievable.

Tell me, for a guy like Baldwin that venerated Stalin and was a believer in communism, what was his objective in creating the ACLU? What do you think he had in mind? What were his motives? Sounds like some kind of malicious ploy to me. How is a Stalinist genuinely concerned with civil liberties? It doesn't make sense. Was the objective to exploit the concept of civil liberties as a weapon to destroy American society?

Sears: He might not have called himself a Stalinist, but who and what was he?

Early on, Baldwin aligned himself with individuals such as the radical anarchist Emma (a.k.a. "Red Emma") Goldman and her "mentor," Prince Peter Alexeevich Kropotkin, who was a Russian revolutionary. Baldwin was enamored with Kroptokin's beliefs calling for the elimination of the church as an instrument to "exercise control over the individual spontaneity of man."

Baldwin showed much sympathy to the Soviet economic system in his statement in his Harvard classbook, and in the forward he wrote to Letter from Russian Prisons (1924), even after warned by a then deported Goldman of what Stalin was about, he amazingly said; "Many of them today look upon Russia today as a great laboratory of social experimentation of incalculable value to the development of the world."

We believe Baldwin was more desirous of a totally secular society where no one had to be held personally responsible for their actions because of an obligation of a greater good to society, which requires personal restraint. William Donahue pointed out Baldwin's justification for embracing the Stalin regime thusly: "Economic freedom, i.e. the abolition of class privilege, was more important than civil liberties. Anticipating the charge that he was engaging in duplicity, Baldwin frankly acknowledged that 'repressions in western democracies are violations of professed constitutional liberties and I condemn them as such. Repressions in Soviet Russia are weapons of struggle in a transition period to socialism.'"

Baldwin also said, "I accepted the fact that civil liberties were not suitable for Russia..." a position we suspect few Russians agreed with...

Thus, ultimately, the ACLU's brand of "civil liberties," per se, is just a means to an end, not the end. The end is the destruction of the primary roots of Western civilization, the "constraints" they hold, and their biggest proponent, the United States of America.

FP: How serious and damaging is the ACLU's agenda in the context of the war on terror?

Sears: The ACLU and it allies have used every time of national crisis to pursue their agenda. Roger Baldwin, before he settled on the present ACLU name and structure was jailed in World War I for refusal to undergo a physical examination for the draft and used his organizations to push his personal agenda. ACLU members in California supported the Assembly's action on September 12, 2001 -- while the rest of the nation was focused on terrorist seizure of four airliners -- to ram through "domestic partner" legislation AB205 in their quest to redefine marriage in America.

In their selective comments about the war on terror, the ACLU -- which has no bones about people who "spy" on the weekend activities of former congressman Henry Hyde or demand to read his mail has used its PR machine to paint America as a rogue nation with little or no regard for human rights, therefore empowering our enemies and to push the ACLU's agenda to implement the use of international law to further undermine the U.S. Constitution.

After filing a complaint against the United States to the United Nations, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said: "With today's actions, we are sending a strong message of solidarity to advocates in other countries who have derided the impact of U.S. policies on the human rights of their citizens. We are filing this complaint before the United Nations to ensure that U.S. policies and practices reflect not just domestic constitutional standards but accepted international human rights principles regarding liberty and its deprivations."

So, while the ACLU may actually stumble across some areas of governmental overreach, it is never all as it seems on the surface. Much of what the ACLU is doing not only fuels those who seek to destroy America, but it also undermines and subverts the very Constitution that millions have fought and died to protect.

FP: What can all of us do best to fight this sinister organization and to expose it for what it really is?

Sears: Well, that's why we wrote the book.

The American public needs to know that the ACLU is not an organization that stands up for the little guy, or was a "good" organization that somehow got off track for awhile. The public needs to know that ACLU was created to destroy the America our founders created right from the ACLU's start. It is our hope that people will read the book, share it with their friends, and as a result a groundswell of opposition will occur to the ACLU and its secular agenda for America.

The ACLU has achieved many of its victories because no one showed up in the courtroom -- or those who did show up to oppose them were not those who cared most about the outcomes or were under funded and ill-prepared.

That's why thirty-five concerned organizational leaders came together in 1994 to form the Alliance Defense Fund. "Enough was enough." While the ACLU and its allies still dwarf the resources ofADF and our allies, they are no longer allowed to run roughshod over the American people. When a public official falls prey to the ACLU's strategy of "fear, intimidation, and disinformation," ADF and its allies are there with the training, strategy, funding, and litigation to assist them to stand up to the ACLU's bully tactics. We now have over 800 trained allied attorneys nationwide, and hope to have 5,000 within the next ten years to take the battle to the ACLU and reclaim our nation's legal system to the original intent of our Founding Fathers, and not the intent of the ACLU. We would greatly appreciate any support your readers could provide in this effort. I am confident, that if we work together, we CAN and WILL WIN.

FP: Mr. Sears, thank you for joining us today. You are doing truly valuable work. We wish you the best of luck.

Sears: Thank you.

Read the entire article on the Frontpage Magazine website (new window will open). Reprinted with permission.